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Secondary Content Area Literacy for School Leadership. The Johns Hopkins University Dr. Mariale Hardiman Dr. Margaret Brown. National Reading Crisis:.
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Secondary Content Area Literacy forSchool Leadership The Johns Hopkins University Dr. MarialeHardiman Dr. Margaret Brown
National Reading Crisis: • “Learning to read is considered a public health issue, for reading deficiencies affect a child for a lifetime” Dr. Reid Lyon, National Institute of Health.
The Sorry Facts About Reading Performance in this Nation: Statistics on reading achievement…
National Reading Crisis • 191 million adults, or 47% are either illiterate or can perform only basic literary tasks(National Center for Educational Statistics, NCES).
National Reading Crisis The literacy levels of young adults has decreased during the last ten years (NCES). Fewer than 30% of middle school students comprehend grade level texts beyond a mere literal level of understanding (McCray, 2001).
Statistic on National Reading Crisis • Good News/Bad News according to National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP): From 1992 to 2000, good readers are getting better; poor readers are getting worse…
NAEP Scores 1992-2000 • Reading scores of highest-performing readers improving over time. • Reading scores of lowest-performing readers declining over time.
NAEP Scores 2002-200790th and 10th percentilesred = high achievers blue = low achievers • Reading scores of highest-performing readers increase by one point • Reading scores of lowest-performing readers declining by three points
Reading Problems Do Not Begin In Middle School… • 40% of fourth graders in the U.S. cannot read grade-level material, including • 70% of children from inner-city schools (Bush, 2001). • 30% lack basic competence in reading (Showers, Joyce, Scanlon, & Schnaubelt, 1998).
SCARY FACTS!!!!! • One child in eight who is behind in reading at the end of first grade ever catches up to his peers (Bryant et al., 2000).
Reading Failure is not confined to poorest or lowest performing school districts… • Even in high achieving school districts, up to 20% of secondary school students have poor reading skills (Showers et al., 1998).
Reading Disabilities • Connecticut Longitudinal Study found that over 70% of students identified as reading disabled in grade 3 were still identified as reading disabled in grade 12 (Lyon et al., 2001).
NIH World-wide Longitudinal Study • Tested 39,802 children and adults from North America, Europe, Asia. • 43% demonstrated reading difficulty. • Some were followed for 18 years and measured 3 times per year to determine which children were most at risk for reading failure.
Who is most at risk for reading failure?? • The NIH study concluded that, “Irrespective of race or culture, children most at risk for reading failure are those who grow up in poverty” (Lyon, 2002).
WHY???? • Oral Language: • According to Reid Lyon (2002), “three-year olds from affluent homes have a larger vocabulary than the parents of three-years from disadvantaged homes.” • Print Awareness: • In addition to oral language deficiencies, children in poverty have fewer opportunities to recognize sound/symbol relationships.
Oral Language Exposure • Children of professional parents hear an average of 2,100 words per hour; • Children of working-class parents hear 1,200 words per hour; • Children of parents in poverty hear 600 words per hour (Howard, 2000).
What Does the Research Say? Brain Research School-Based Research
Biological Programming • Learning to speak is a naturally occurring process, learning to read is NOT!
Brain Research Says… • The brain is biologically programmed for oral language; a baby is born able to produce sound of any language; by 10 months of age, a baby can no longer distinguish sounds that are part of other languages but not his own (Diamond & Hopson, 1998).
Speaking occurs through exposure to language, BUT… • Reading is not a natural process; it must be TAUGHT • Good readers process words phoneme by phoneme, but do it automatically and fluently. • Only 28-30% of words can be predicted from context, • Good readers rely on sound/symbol structure to decode unknown words (NIH, 2002).
Do brain systems in poor readers activate differently than good readers? • Children with reading deficits demonstrate neurobiological deactivation in the left frontal lobe, the brain region that processes language.
Brain Research and Reading • Akerman (1998) found neurological differences in poor readers depending on whether or not they possessed phonics skills. Poor readers who demonstrated phonics skills showed greater brain efficiency than poor readers who had no phonics skills.
Brain Research and Reading Sally Shawitz (2004) found that after an intensive phonics intervention, the brain scans of reading impaired 6 to 9 year olds changed resembling brain activity of normal readers.
Reading Issues • Instruction shifts from teaching reading to using reading to learn. • Students are expected to have enough reading competence to be able to obtain information from content area texts. • Many students cannot effectively use content texts. • Content area teachers often feel unprepared to teach reading skills within content. (Should they be expected to?)
Reading Issues for Students with Reading Deficiencies • Remedial reading approaches for secondary school students typically focus on comprehension, which assumes that reading difficulties are problems of cognition and language; • However, for many older readers, the difficulty stems from poor decoding skills, which then lead to difficulties in fluency and comprehension (Chall, 1993).
HIERARCHY OF READING • Phonemic Awareness • Phonics • Fluency/Automaticity • Vocabulary • Comprehension
No more reading wars… • Children need BOTH explicit instruction in phonics and skill development as well as exposure to a wide variety of literature and print materials.
